moral strength in her own quiet and forceful way. She was showing her own form of courage… just as were all the other family members in Germany. They were answering the call. Their favorite song was 'From a Distance.'
Franks remembered all that he, Denise, and Margie had been through during and after Vietnam. And he remembered the hospital recovery of almost twenty-one months.
Before he'd left for the Gulf, he had promised Denise he'd come back 'whole' from this operation, but with a smile, she'd reminded him that that was no longer possible. They hadn't been able to phone each other often while he was on duty in the Gulf. The one phone call they'd had to this point in January was tense and full of feeling.
In Bad Kissingen, Germany, Margie, also now an Army spouse, had her own family of two boys and her husband, Greg. Greg was a captain in the Blackhorse. At that moment, he was S-3 of the 2nd Squadron, 11th ACR, or 'Battle 3,' the same job Franks had had in Vietnam. Now Margie's dad was at war again. Denise had sent him a tape recording of the family, and he would listen to it to hear the sounds of their voices. Family was real close, just like his VII Corps family. They both inspired him.
After pulling his tanker suit pant leg over the top so he did not have to remove the boot, Franks unstrapped his prosthetic leg. He set it where he could reach it in the dark, then pulled the sleeping bag over him, said a prayer for his troops and that he would have the wisdom to do what was right, and slept soundly.
CHAPTER TWO
Duty
Major Fred Franks fought in Vietnam with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the 'Blackhorse,' from August 1969, when he arrived, to May 1970, when he was severely wounded during the Cambodian invasion. He had previously served with the Blackhorse in Germany for almost three and a half years, from March 1960 to July 1963, and he was glad to be back in his old outfit. He was a cavalry officer; he knew cavalry; cavalry was his home. And the Blackhorse was his regiment.
Like so many Americans before him, Franks got off the plane with his fellow soldiers at Long Binh, Vietnam, ready to do his duty. He had flown over in a stretch DC-8 out of Travis Air Force Base, just north of San Francisco. Just the day before, he had said good-bye to Denise and Margie at the Philadelphia International Airport and flown to San Francisco. His kid brother, Farrell, had driven them to the airport, and his mother and dad met them there to say good-bye. It was a quick forty-eight-hour transition from what soldiers called 'the world' to a combat zone.
The first thing that hit him getting off the plane was the unmistakable smell. It was a combination of the heat, the smoke in the air from burning wood, and who knew what else. But he would never forget it.
Fighter aircraft were parked close by. He heard sounds of jet fighters taking off and flying overhead, as well as the unmistakable Vietnam sound of UH-1 'Huey' helicopter rotor blades slapping in the air. He was intent on taking in as much as he could, right away, as he thought back on how he'd gotten there.
After graduating from West Point in 1959, Franks had asked for and was commissioned into armor. He was a 'tanker,' and yet he saw himself as more than that. Though tanks are the centerpiece of cavalry — they give it its punch — cavalry goes beyond tanks. Armored cavalry is the first team; it has a command freedom, an esprit, an ethos. In the cavalry, small units operate a combination of potent weapons systems (in the Army, this is called 'combined arms') that give them the capability to move fast and hit hard. On the battlefield, these units operate under decentralized leadership in missions that are out in front of everyone else.
First, though, Franks had to go through some fundamentals: a basic armor course at Fort Knox, then Ranger and airborne schools at Fort Benning. Chest deep on patrol in the dark waters of the Florida swamps and then in the numbing cold of the Dahlonega, in the Georgia hills, Franks learned a lot about himself and combat. It was the best individual peacetime training he ever got in the Army.
Franks did his apprentice work in armored cavalry along the Iron Curtain between Czechoslovakia and West Germany during a time that included the 1961 Berlin crisis and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In the crucible of daily life as a young troop leader in the Blackhorse, he learned from the officers and noncommissioned officers the tough, hard skills of small-unit tactical leadership. Combat veterans of World War II and Korea drilled them on combat cavalry fundamentals and taught them tribal wisdom through war stories during the long nights at the border camps along the Czech border. Like so many others, he developed his tactical skills by doing his job day to day in the field, by listening, working hard, and by making damn-fool mistakes, and being allowed to get back up and learn from them.
For his first fifteen months in the Blackhorse, Franks was a lieutenant leader of the smallest combined-arms unit in the U.S. Army, an armored cavalry platoon of scouts, tanks, mechanized infantry, and a self-propelled mortar. From there he was the squadron's support platoon leader, responsible for leading truck resupply of the squadron. For the next eight months, he was executive officer (second in command) of a cavalry troop. Then he commanded Troop I.
When he headed to Vietnam, it was the Blackhorse he intended to belong to — but he almost didn't make it. By the time Franks got to Vietnam, the beginnings of the U.S. drawdown had screwed up the individual replacement system so badly that all orders were canceled, and new replacements were sequestered upon arrival to await new orders. He was instructed not to call anyone. No way, Franks thought, I've got to get to a phone. He got through to a sergeant at the Blackhorse unit at Long Binh. 'Wait right there, don't go anywhere else, we'll be over to get you. We knew you were coming.'
The next morning, true to the sergeant's word, the Blackhorse sent a vehicle over and picked him up. 'Major Franks? Come with me, sir. Your orders are all cut and we're ready to go.' When Franks saw that rearing black horse patch on the soldier's shoulder, he felt as though he had seen a family member. Actually, he had.
In 1969, the Blackhorse was one of four cavalry regiments on active duty in the Army. The others, 2nd, 3rd, and 14th, were in Germany. The Blackhorse had been withdrawn from Germany in the summer of 1964 and stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. When the big U.S. buildup in Vietnam began in 1965, it soon became apparent that an armored cavalry regiment would be a valuable asset in the war, and the 11th ACR was deployed to Vietnam, arriving in 1966. It immediately established itself as a tough combat regiment, successfully completing a wide variety of missions on many different terrains. Soon it had inflicted heavy punishment on the Viet Cong and the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army.
The Army is a competitive organization, but Franks was a competitive man. When he joined the 11th ACR in Vietnam, he had not yet met a wall that could stop him. If there was a hurdle to leap — physical, psychological, or intellectual — he leapt it. If he failed the first time, he worked and trained until he made it over. He was an athlete; he was used to intense training and to hard drills. And he was used to the payoff that hard training gave him. Though at five-eight, he couldn't be called physically impressive, he was a talented baseball player who'd reached a career batting average of better than.300 on the West Point baseball team, and been team captain. There's a good chance he would have succeeded as a professional ballplayer. He was tempted. In 1961, the choice confronted him: to be a soldier or a baseball player. Franks chose soldier.
There was also in him a finely tuned, well-developed mind, and in 1964, the Army sent him to Columbia University to study for an M.A. in English. Afterward, he was scheduled to teach at West Point. It was a two-year course at a high-ranking school, but characteristically, he pushed it. He finished the degree in a year, in the belief that he would be sent to Vietnam for the second year, and then to West Point following that. Somehow a bureaucratic foul-up put a stop to that: 'If we've set you up for two years of study,' he was told, 'you have to put yourself through two years of study.' And it turned out he couldn't go to Vietnam in 1965 after all. Daunted, yet still pushing hard, he continued at Columbia and completed most of the course work for a Ph.D. Then he went on, as planned, to West Point, where, on a teacher's schedule, he had the opportunity to finish up his days at a reasonable hour and perhaps spend real time with Denise and Margie (like most young Army officers, he'd been away more often than he was home).
Don't count on it. He did get to spend more time with them, but he also hit the books and completed his Ph.D. orals, while carrying a full teaching load and taking on the job of assistant varsity baseball coach for the fall and spring. On top of that, he took a correspondence course from Fort Sill to keep his nuclear weapons proficiency current, a necessary skill for officers in the 1960s.
